The founder and director of the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), a global nonprofit organization for authors who self-publish, has called many places home, but Orna Ross truly lives just outside her comfort zone. "If you're not feeling that doubt and calling on your courage, you haven't gone far enough," she says.
Despite how most indie authors may recognize her now, Ross’s experience in the author community is not only tied to ALLi; for many years before the organization got its start and into today, Ross has been an author, poet, and publishing professional herself.
Reflecting on her writing journey, the themes of her historical novels, and her work with ALLi, Ross keeps coming back to setting. "To me, place is like another character. I'm hugely interested in how place affects how we are," she says. Wexford, where she grew up, has inspired many of the stories she writes in her fiction and poetry. Her experiences in college in Dublin, and her life in London afterward, helped to form the progressive, liberal ideology that led to her work supporting other authors.
Finding Her Place
The award-winning Irish novelist and poet was raised in Wexford, a town in the southeast of Ireland notable for its large writing community and annual literary festival. Despite the great respect for writing this setting inspired, Ross says, “I didn't even think about being a writer because in a way, and this seems impossible now, but I was brought up in a world [in the seventies] where girls did certain things: nursing and teaching. I didn't so much aspire to be a writer. I wanted to be somebody who taught English literature.” She earned her bachelor’s degree in English literature at University College Dublin and taught at a secondary school in Ireland for a few years before deciding that though she loved teaching, she hated the system. In trying to decide what to do next, Ross trained herself to write while teaching aerobics and taking other odd jobs, intending to someday write a novel.
Later, she received a master’s degree in women’s studies from her alma mater. She says the experience was “huge for me in terms of understanding that all the things I thought were my issues were actually society's issues. And that was just a brilliant experience, and a lot of this feeds into my work and still does to this day.”
Within a few years, the university hired her as a lecturer. Ross also began working as a freelance journalist, before becoming an editor at a women’s magazine. Her first full-length publications were nonfiction works produced through a feminist press in Dublin.
“But what I really wanted to do was to write a novel,” she says. “So again it was: Throw everything out, start again.” Her debut novel Lover’s Hollow, a multi-generational literary history, was published by Penguin Books in 2006, followed by A Dance in Time in 2008. The process of finishing the novel, finding an agent, and getting it published led her to a community of other fledgling writers. She “ended up running a writing school in Dublin, and out of that writing school a literary agency grew.” Her students were getting offers they weren’t prepared to analyze, so she began arguing with publishers on their behalf.
Making a Big Move
Although she loved championing her students’ work, Ross wasn’t comfortable in the legal role of agent. When she was diagnosed with cancer just as she was planning to expand the agency to San Francisco, she took a hiatus to reassess her priorities. “I stepped back from everything,” she says. But she didn’t stop writing. Ross continued to post about her experience on her blog, sharing everything from her decision to attend a launch for her second novel bare-headed to her perspective on the traditional metaphor of “battling” the disease. She is now cancer-free.
“When I came back, self-publishing had started to happen, and I didn’t think it would be for me,” she says. But she tested it with a poetry book and immediately recognized the potential. “I instantly saw that it was transformative—not just another route to market.” She’d never been happy with the loss of control that came with giving her rights to a traditional publisher. Penguin had not taken her skills, or her interest in the marketing of her book, seriously. So in 2011, with her two-book contract complete, she took back the rights to her novels and, as she says, “put the books out the way I had originally envisaged them [and] within a very short time, I had sold more than they had sold.” Ross considers leaving Penguin the best move of her writing life.
Most of Ross’s Historical Fiction is cross-generational, drawing on the events of turn-of-the-century Ireland and their long-lasting effects on families. She describes her books as exploring “creative expansion and the rebalance of male and female forces.” She’s redeveloping her first novel into a trilogy, with two books, After the Rising and Before the Fall, already published and the third, In the Hour, in progress.
The shift to self-publishing brought her personal motto, “When in doubt, be braver,” into focus. As with any new experience, doubt can disrupt the process, but writers who stop there can get stuck. “If we're feeling creative doubt, we're scared with it. That is absolutely 100 percent part of the process,” she explains. “So ‘when in doubt, be brave’ means, ‘Okay, I'm going to overcome my doubts and just do what I planned.’ ‘When in doubt, be braver’ means if I go bigger, I get excited enough to have that wave of positive creative energy that will actually buoy me up. And the doubt won't win.”
Ross makes this conscious effort to step out of her comfort zone—she calls it “conscious creativity”—to address challenges in both her writing and her business. It’s a process that involves cycling work, rest, and play. In the day-to-day, this means spending her mornings making something, whether that’s writing novels, poetry, or podcast scripts. She dedicates her afternoons to ALLi and anything the business needs. Maintaining spaces for rest and play alongside her work prevents burnout.
Building a New Foundation
One of the first things Ross did after deciding to become an indie author was begin looking for professional organizations to join. But self-publishing was still a relatively new business, and the type of association she wanted didn’t exist. The only solution was to create it herself. So she applied conscious creativity to the problem.
Initially, Ross was hesitant to take on the responsibility for the group when she was just starting to publish her own work. But she took time to consider what it would mean to the field, and ultimately, she decided, “I couldn't not do it because this was the biggest thing that had happened in my field in centuries,” she says. “It was going to change everything. I knew it would. And I was very excited about that and the fact that authors could become empowered in a way that they hadn't been before.”
She founded ALLi with her husband and co-director Philip Lynch at London Book Fair in 2012. Now, after ten years, ALLi has a global reach with tens of thousands of members. Much of what they do is behind the scenes, supporting the interests of self-published authors. She credits the team of advisors and ambassadors with ALLi’s many success stories and is particularly proud of the watchdog desk, she says, “and the work it does in promoting good services and in warning people away from lesser services.” Recent articles from the Watchdog blog include “Seven Red Flags in Serialized Fiction Contracts” and “How to Spot and Avoid Phishing Emails.”
Of course, the experience has helped Ross, too. Since founding ALLi, Ross says, “I write better books. I'm a better publisher. Everything because of ALLi.”
It’s been exciting for Ross to see the ways independent publishing has evolved over the years. “I think people are really beginning to understand independence as a value, and what it means to be an independent and empowered author,” she says. Now the challenge is keeping up with what she calls “a massively morphing industry since we started, and even more so in the last year.” In the next ten years, “the role of anyone who cares about creators and authors is helping authors to understand their own power and to understand their own humanity, and the value that that has,” she says. “Because we're working in this area that is so creative and so innovative, and the authors within it are the most creative and innovative authors alive today.”
She hopes her own current project will shine a light on the creativity of an author from the past. Maud Gonne, an Irish suffragette, activist, and poet, is best known as W. B. Yeats’s muse, but Ross would like to change that. Hoping to get Gonne the honor she deserves, Ross headed a Kickstarter campaign to have a statue erected in Dublin, where it will “foster a debate about the politics of remembrance,” according to the campaign details. In support of this effort, Ross has also expanded her historical novel about the couple, Her Secret Rose, into a trilogy and developed a companion book of Yeats’s poems with Gonne’s commentary on them, A Crowd of Stars.
For an author of Historical Fiction, the past and present often walk side-by-side. With this project, Ross advocates for representation that will empower modern women by honoring the legacies of those who have come before. It’s a fitting endeavor for one whose work has already empowered so many, and it’s proof that true allyship is timeless.
